Saturday, January 26, 2013

The odd thing about the controversy about Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi's anti-Semitic comments is that while everyone professes shock at--while debating the significance of--his standard-issue Muslim Brotherhood-style anti-Semitism, everyone has been completely ignoring his standard-issue Muslim Brotherhood-style anti-Americanism. (He refers in the very same video to "the Zionist and American enemies" as the culprits behind the Palestinian Authority.) And while one might conceivably conclude that his crude slurs about Jews being "descendants of apes and pigs" reflect mere personal prejudices of little geopolitical significance, his labeling of Americans as "enemies" is a bit harder to dismiss so cavalierly.

And that's presumably why it's being ignored. To a large segment of the American (and global) foreign policy and journalistic establishment, Morsi's anti-Americanism isn't irrelevant--rather, it's a perfectly reasonable sentiment that needs to be downplayed to avoid inflaming the uneducated yahoos who don't appreciate its wisdom.

1 comment:

Anonymous
said...

The fact that Morsi not so long ago taught engineering at a California university makes his anti-American pronouncements so much more significant. Clearly, he is not one of those ignorant, xenophobic Egyptians who never ventured outside of his/her country and would have had little or no contact with the rest of the world. He is a Muslim who chose to live among the kuffars, at least temporarily. That makes his hostility more puzzling and more disturbing. However, I predict for Mr. Morsi a rather short political career; it is very likely that the current demonstrations against him will result in a military coup under the pretext of restoring order. The Obama administration is biding its time, waiting for Morsi's inevitable demise.